94 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. 



them alter his death. It would be possible to reduce 

 them to a tenth part if we could rid them of all useless 

 and foreign matter, and of a prolixity which I find 

 almost overwhelming; were this only done^ his books 

 should be regarded as among the best we have on the 

 subject of natural history in its entirety. The plan of 

 his work is good, his classification distinguished for 

 its good sense, his dividing lines well marked, his 

 descriptions sufficiently accurate — monotonous it is 

 true, but painstaking ; the historical part of his work 

 is less good ; it is often confused and fabulous, and the 

 author shows too manifestly the credulous tendencies 

 of his mind. 



" While going over his work, I have been struck with 

 that defect, or rather excess, which we find in almost 

 all the books of a hundred or a couple of hundred years 

 ago, and which prevails still among the Germans — I 

 mean with that quantity of useless erudition with 

 which they intentionally swell out their works, and 

 the result of which is that their subject is overlaid 

 with a mass of extraneous matter on which they enlarge 

 with great complacency, but with no consideration 

 whatever for their readers. They seem, in fact, to have 

 forgotten what they have to say in their endeavour to 

 tell us what has been said by other people. 



" I picture to myself a man like Aldrovandus, after he 

 has once conceived the design of writing a complete 

 natural history. I see him in his library reading, one 

 after the other, ancients, moderns, philosophers, theo- 

 logians, jurisconsults, historians, travellers, poets, and 



